If neither is correct (or both simultaneously), is it even a meaningful statement about the world to declare a human right like Tor does?
Yes. Tor is correct and Facebook is wrong. I said it. Other people might say otherwise, but I'll say they're wrong. (and they are)
In societies it is normal to have disagreements.
What people do is discuss the issue and potentially reach an agreement. Maybe this will become a law somewhere. Maybe it will go into the Universal Declaration, and most countries will implement it. Maybe not. After becoming a law, people will either follow it or not. If they sort of break the law, a judge or peers will decide if they need punishment. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Who knows.
Life is not a computer program or math equation. Life is a bit hard.
If you tell me the angular sum of a triangle is 180 degrees, I cannot see it directly with my senses, but I can construct a simple proof with pen and paper that shows me it cannot be any other way than what you told me.
How do you experience the truth of the human right to privacy?
Societies are much more complex than that.
I can try to convince you that this is right, if that's what you're asking. But no, there won't be a math equation or an scientific measurement that proves that it is correct. Because we're humans, not numbers or bits.
I can't touch something like a social contract or an ideological standpoint, I don't know where it is are or how long it's been there, when it happened, how intense it is, whether it has any properties, whether it was caused or can cause; these things don't appear to be like anything that in any sense can be said to exist. If these things are gods, then for the sake of this conversation let's call my position an agnostic one.
Society is complex, but even complex things are built from the parts we can see and touch, and since our senses are the only means we have for interacting with the world, even impossibly complex things must somehow be relatable back to them (unless there is some additional channel in which knowledge enters our minds?).
If something is so nebulous that it is completely built from things we can't experience in any way other than being told about them, then how can they be said to exist at all, how could we tell this tale apart from complete fiction?
What do you mean by "prove"? You can easily extend your skepticism to any body of knowledge. The empirical sciences ought not be given a free pass merely because of some unexamined (and incoherent) prejudice like scientism.
Everything can be said to be a matter of opinion, so that does nothing to clarify the subject.
The bigger question here is: why does a moral statement can only be valid when it's valid in absolute? Why does it have to have a proof that's easy enough for a person that's willingly choosing to ignore knowledge?
Why do we assert that this-and-that is a human right in such a context?
Also, the "is-ought" problem follows from a particular (very problematic) metaphysics. It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Why is it problematic?
> It does not follow from an Aristotelian understanding of metaphysics.
Aristotle's metaphysics does also carry some baggage. It is contingent on an unmoved mover/active intellect that creates not only motion but purpose in the universe.
Although his ethics can broadly be taken at face value as long as you agree with the proposition that your purpose is to flourish as a human. It does seem to work pretty well, although the question he was truly answering was how to be a happy individual, whereas the meaning of ethics has shifted over the millennia to deal more with civic virtues than personal ones.
No, it flows from propositional logic, which is not a metaphysics. You can't have an “ought” conclusion with only “is” premises.
A metaphysics may assume “ought” axioms and thus support “ought” conclusions from only “is” additional bases, but then you still aren't getting an “ought” from an “is”, you are getting it from the “ought” you assumed with your metaphysics.
All you're saying here is that we've agreed on a principle that implies what you're saying is true. This is the exact same as what the other commenter is saying.
They killed Socrates for asking too many of these types of questions.
This is the opposite of Socrates. He started from the premise that he knew nothing. In this discussion here, you're asking questions from the premise that already know most things about the subject. Also, this is not why Socrates was killed, please do some reading instead of jumping on another meme.
Also: comparing yourself to Socrates for asking fallacious questions is peak Hacker News. Don't think I ever saw such arrogance.
I merely just wished to have a discussion on how we do determine what right "should be" a human right, and what makes it a human right, or simply, a right to begin with? It is actually quite a lengthy topic, and for example Rothbard has written a lot on how human rights are property rights and so forth. We could have gotten to animal's rights as well! I suppose one could brush it all under the rug with the term "subjective", but I would rather not stop there.
But in any case, this is my only defense for the OP. I have no idea how one would "experience the truth" of a human right, I would need some more answers before I get to know what the OP has meant by it exactly.
As for the Socrates stuff, I have no comment on that.
---
Allow me to quote some Rothbard:
> There are several aspects of this important truth. In the first place, each individual, according to our understanding of the natural order of things, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. Preservation of this self-ownership is essential for the proper development and well-being of man. The human rights of the person are, in effect, a recognition of each man’s inalienable property right over his own being; and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced. A man’s right to personal freedom, then, is his property right in himself.
> But there is another sense in which human rights are really property rights, a sense which is much obscured in our time. Take, for example, the human right of freedom of assembly. Suppose that a certain group wants to demonstrate for a particular idea or bill in a street meeting. This is an expression of the right of assembly.
> On the other hand, suppose that the police break up the meeting on the ground that traffic is being disrupted. Now, it is not sufficient simply to say that the right of assembly has been abridged by the police for political reasons. Possibly, this was the case. But there is a real problem here, for maybe traffic was disrupted. In that case, how is one to decide between the human right of free assembly and the "public policy" or "public good" of clear and unobstructed traffic?
> In the face of this apparent conflict, many people conclude that rights must be relative rather than absolute and have to be curbed sometimes for the common good.
Taken from https://fee.org/articles/human-rights-are-property-rights/.
Feel free to call BS on it. Kinda is. Ultimately it's the human might that supports rights.